April 12, 1998

By BARBARA QUICK

IN A LAND OF PLENTY
By Tim Pears.
Picador USA, $25.

im Pears, who received rave reviews for his first novel, ''In the Place of Fallen Leaves,'' seems to have set out to produce a British ''Buddenbrooks'' in his second. Located in an unnamed industrial town, ''In a Land of Plenty'' offers a loosely woven social and political history of England in the past 40 years, side by side with a soap opera chronicling the life of the town's leading family, the Freemans. At the book's center is the patriarch, Charles Freeman, whose fortunes rise in inverse proportion to the personal misery of his wife and offspring, most of whom are eventually extinguished or at least stunted by his overwhelming narcissism. This is especially true of James, Charles's second-born son, who literally limps through life and is possessed by a need to photograph the daily existence of those he sees around him. ''I'm not an artist,'' he admits to the woman he'll later marry. ''I'm just a chronicler of small events.'' The photographic archive he leaves behind is the visual equivalent of Pears's novel: painstakingly rendered, exhaustive in its detail, but short on an overarching sense of meaning (or, as James says of his photographs, ''too mediocre to last long''). Still, the story is touching at times, and there are some choice moments, as when Charles's young granddaughter asks incredulously at the end of Margaret Thatcher's political rule, ''Can a man be Prime Minister, Mummy?''